!Click Song

by John A. Williams

The party was already going, folk singers in one corner, dart throwers in the bathroom, the drinkers with their bottles in the kitchen. Paul embraced me and raised a gleeful shout when we deposited our booze with him. “Hey, man. Glad you got here. Did you catch Leonard? Fantastic. What, no women? You picking up here? Let’s talk when we can. See Claire? Wow, what a fuckin’ mob, but great, huh? God, it’s good to see you.”

  He was high, feeling good, magnanimous and explosive with laughter. I liked him that way.

  Dorothea Blue-Sky was pregnant, delivery imminent, or so it seemed, and looking at her through the crush of loud, well-fed people when we turned from Paul, who was already engaged in three different conversations, I thought of Monica in her Spanish silence and poverty; I wondered about Federico and my own child.

  “And why, pray tell, are you looking so sad?”

  It was Selena Merritt, wriggling uncomfortably in the arm Amos had thrown around her. She was smiling down at me because I had flopped on the floor; moving about was useless. I moved over. She sat down and kissed me on the cheek.

  “Hello, Selena.”

  “Why?”

  “Looking so sad?”

  “Yes.”

  “I was thinking of something sad.”

  “I’ma get a drink,” Amos said, and vanished.

  “You’re gonna talk to me now, huh?” I said to Selena.

  “Cato, darling, I always talk to you.” Her laugh was like the clinking of ice cubes.

  Poode appeared, carrying two drinks. He gave one to Selena and crouched down beside us. We shook hands.

  “How’ve you been, Cate? Been a long time.”

  “Yeah. I hear you’re with Reviews.”

  “Right. Waiting for the old hands to die. Say, I liked your book.”

  Pouting, Selena said, “Yes, but why didn’t you review it?”

  She was awfully sexy when she pouted like that. I had seen her like this only with Poode.

  “Sweetheart,” he said, after kissing her, sucking on her lips, and she on his, “I’m only a rung on a very tall ladder. I tried to get it in.”

  She giggled.

  “What?” Poode said.

  “I tried to get it in,” she said, laughing. He laughed too.

  Where, I wondered, was his Mavis? They kissed again and I crept away, the sound of Leonard’s voice now striking my ears in familiar metered tones. Drunk, now, weaving in a corner, his eyes fixed on a vision the rest of us could not see, he recited into the stilling rooms, the words falling and rising,

  Good men …

  Wild men …

  Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight …

  It was Dylan Thomas and not, Leonard Blue-Sky and not, a strange synthesis, and the writers, actors, dancers, the dart throwers and drinkers, the people, glanced from Dorothea’s huge belly (to be Dylan Blue-Sky) to the sweating, shining face of her husband. Finishing the last line, which bounds upward for two words and then slants down, Leonard, even as people lifted their hands to clap, assumed a humbled, bent posture, though still weaving; a look of cunning anticipation replaced the severe/serene expression he’d worn while reciting Thomas and his voice was pitched higher as he spoke:

  Air a-gittin cool and coolah

  Frost a-comin in de night

  and he did the whole Dunbar poem, winking at me, at Amos, at Ike and at Selena, did it in dialect as Dunbar wrote it. I felt a deep shame as his voice creaked out, a perfect imitation of an old man talking to or thinking about the strutting turkey who is unable to read the signs of the times, and the shame was that I had never thought of Leonard and Paul Laurence Dunbar together; Dylan Thomas and the others, yes, but Dunbar, never. Then why would he never talk to me, never get down?

  Ah, he had been so very, very far ahead, had already reached the peak (his posthumously published volumes, three of them, including what is now known as “Native American” verse, thundered briefly through the universe, like rocks metamorphosed, and then were buried under till), and stood weaving at what proved to be not a peak after all, but an abyss, and then really got down to the serious business of drinking himself to death in a thousand bars, some better than Dylan Thomas’ White Horse on Hudson Street, but many, many of them a hundred times worse, then he fell in.

  “Sign him,” I said to Amos. “Sign him.”

  A man who made love to words like that and let them make love to him … “Sign him.”

  “I don’t fuck with poetry, man. It doesn’t sell,” he said.

  We, Leonard and I, never had a talk, the talk I think we should have had. He did not want to admit to race, nor to having the fears it imposes, nor to perceiving the certainty of victimization because of it; Leonard wished to be the pure artist, a man of all men and a scribe for all of their seasons. When he saw, before the rest of us, that he had been born far too soon, he hastened out of his life, perhaps so that he could return to another. He still had time left then, as I eased away from the party; it was growing late and the people raucous. Ike had found the ear of Poode’s embittered girl, Mavis, who had long since stopped launching withering glances at Poode and Selena, and Amos had already gone. I went down the stairs and hearing noises coming from a closet built under them, disregarded my first instinct, which was to ignore them, and opened the door and quickly closed it, having seen Claire going down on a guy from the New York City Ballet. I went out into the street, carrying with me her hot eyes rolled toward me, fear and hatred colliding with her desire.

  I hurried to Allis.

  9

  Paul’s novel, Western Directions, was published the next spring. It was about a beatnik cowboy who is involved in a range war on the side of the good guys. Selena’s first book of poetry was due out soon, and its publication would coincide with the opening of a long one-act play of hers, Ann Zinga of the Congo. A joint party was planned at the Limelight down in the Village. But I did not go, for the evening before, a Friday, Sandra Queensbury picked me up for a trip to West Hampton, where we would spend the weekend.

  Her house (and her husband’s) was an overlarge Cape Cod with weathered gray shakes. It was set among the dunes, and its front faced the sea, whose waves desultorily boomed against the beach. She seemed happy there, calmed, and watching her move from place to place, humming, I wondered if when I reached my fifties I would exude as much sex in a male way as she did in a female way. I hoped so. We ate, drank and made love, and ate, drank and made love again. We talked of our anthology, which had had good library and school sales. Saturday we left the bed only to shower and eat; we brought drinks back to bed and read until, once again, we felt like making love. In between, propped up in bed, she read manuscripts.

  While I slept Sunday morning, Sandra drove into the village and brought back the papers, the Times, the Tribune and Reviews. Poode had written a review of three children’s books. I mentioned it.

  “I didn’t realize you knew Jeremy,” she said.

  “Oh,” I said. “Do you?”

  “Of course. Knew his folks and most of his relatives. What do you think of him?” She removed her glasses, set aside a manuscript.

  “He’s all right, I guess.”

  Sandra reached over to the tray, picked up some toast and leisurely spread strawberry jam on it. “Know anything about him?”

  The way she said “about” made me lower the paper to study her.

  “Yale. A little conservative. Single.”

  “That all?” She smiled.

  I thought, then said, “Yes. Is there anything else?”

  “Ah, yes.” She said it rather heavily, I thought. I went back to the paper, wondering what it was.

  “Interested, Cate?”

  “No.” But I was.

  “You fraud,” she said, kissing me. She smelled of the strawberry jam. “Of course you are. You should be.”

  “Well, tell me.”

  Her eyes twinkled. “I really shouldn’t.”

  “Then why’d you bring it up?”

  “You brought up his
name,” she said. “Then I was tempted to tell.”

  I wished I were with Allis. Suddenly I couldn’t explain to myself why I was here.

  Sandra placed her feet in my crotch and wiggled her toes. “What’ll you give me if I tell?”

  The sun was streaming into the bedroom, turning gold everything it touched. I wondered what Mr. Queensbury (though that wasn’t his name; I’d never heard his name; Queensbury was Sandra’s maiden name) was like in this room.

  Sandra brushed back her hair, straining her chin forward as she did so. “I annoy you now, don’t I?” Gently, she forced the paper down and then turned directly toward me, her legs crossed. She took my hands and placed them upon her upper thighs.

  She said, “Cate, you must’ve guessed that I like young men and that you certainly are not the first to have come here or to have bedded me in my own apartment in Manhattan. Yes?” She smiled. “Yet I’m not altogether a dirty old woman.”

  I said nothing; just watched her measuring her words. “I’m going to tell you about Jeremy, not because you’re good in bed, but because you are, I think, just good in a lot of special ways.” She chucked me under the chin. “It shows, darling, and it’s lovable, but there is a world out there, outside this bedroom and all that sun and sea, that’s a kind of nightmare and certain things happen all the time. I know about most of those things; people like me, we know them.”

  “And people like me?”

  “People like you always suspect what we know to be fact and, of course, we always deny the facts. Jeremy. He’s a nice enough young man; he’ll go very far, I believe; further than most Negroes will go in this business.”

  And now she lighted a cigarette and took a sip of coffee that had long since grown cold. People like me, I thought.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Quite right,” she said. “Had you suspected at all?”

  “No.”

  “It really is too bad,” she said, “that you’re so dark—though I love it; there remains a kind of purity in that that exists nowhere else. All this Scotch-Irish, French-Italian, Polish-German foolishness—you know Woodrow Wilson didn’t trust that. During the First World War he insisted that no hyphenated Americans guard Washington. The nation’s capital was guarded by Negroes. Ironic …”

  My attention had strayed. She saw it.

  “Cate, if you were the color of Jeremy, in this book world not even the sky would limit the distance you could travel. You would be one of the select, a priest, a monk shuffling through the corridors of a musty castle, privy to special knowledge.

  “Don’t you love books, words? You do. I know you do. Something about them. Remember Bradbury’s story? The German book-burnings? Then there are those quaint American school boards and other apple pie groups that decide which books shall be available to the public. A banned book is a burned book.”

  She pulled the sheet up to her chin and peered at me. I had never seen her face so expressionless. “The power of books and the words they contain, my dearest Cate, is recognized, and a number of them come out every year subsidized, you know, by the most inartistic sources, but often are written by the most literary of your colleagues, knowingly and unknowingly both.”

  Now she looked at the hem of the sheet, plucked at it.

  “Praise and damnation are often planned, though we will never admit to such goings-on. And by now you must know that a number, a considerable number, of book reviews reflect not artistic but certain political considerations.

  “Jeremy likes to say of writers, when they are successful, that they are now drinking with another crowd. Isn’t that right?”

  “Yeah. That’s right.”

  “Well, so’s he now. And that’s some crowd.”

  “Sandra, why are you telling me these things, not that I believe them. Should I?”

  “Dear Cato Caldwell. I have given you a short cut to understanding where you are and where you may not be going. You can believe or not, as you damn well please. But you will remember.”

  Clarissa was coming out, and over lunch Ike Plunkett was telling me that he was leaving Amos to go to Ilium because his novel, as I had observed, had not done well. “Man,” he said, “they didn’t do anything for me in publicity or advertising.”

  I thought that Crows in Flight had been an exceptional novel, one of about a half-dozen that were published as if in secret that year.

  “Who’s your editor at Ilium?” I think I already knew the answer.

  “Sandra Queensbury. She’s good. You had her for that anthology.”

  “Yeah, she is good,” I said, and though we were both looking across the room, we were considering, I think, the same person. I had not seen Sandra since West Hampton last spring. It was now November, early, that time of the year when the cold made me think of Spain.

  “Yeah,” I said again. “She’s a nice lady.”

  “Uh-huh,” Ike said. I knew he too had had the view of Central Park, the view of sun and sea, from Sandra’s bedrooms.

  “She sure sounds like Hitler’s momma sometimes,” he said.

  Puzzled, I frowned at him.

  “Jews,” he said, lowering his voice. “Jews in publishing. Taking it over and shit like that.”

  Then I remembered what she had not said about my agent.

  Ike went on. “A whole lot of Negro writers would still be waiting to get published if it weren’t for the Jews—”

  “And a lot of WASP writers WASP publishers didn’t care about,” I said.

  We stared across the room, for a moment said nothing. I finished my coffee and tossed the napkin on the table. Who, I wondered, would come after Ike?

  “Listen,” he said outside the restaurant. “Have a good Thanksgiving, man.”

  “What’re you gonna do?”

  “Oh,” he said, pretending a certain vagueness. “I may go out to the Island.”

  Paul had been mean in small ways, and restless, since his novel had been published. It had received lukewarm reviews, where it was reviewed at all. In a kind of surly, I’ll-show-those-sons-a-bitches mood, he began his second, still holding down his job. He had been unabashedly sure of prominent reviews, so sure; and not wishing him to be hurt, I’d wanted that for him, too. At the same time, however, I was fearful and envious that those reviews just might happen, and when they did not, I was relieved. As a result, we hadn’t seen very much of each other, so his phone call was something of a surprise.

  “How goes it?” I asked.

  “Shit.”

  “What?”

  “Fuck it, Cate. Look, man, do you suppose you could put me up for a couple of weeks or so?”

  I knew he was waiting for my question. I was instead thinking of my privacy, which would evaporate with his presence. I would not be able to enjoy that leisurely intimacy I enjoyed with Allis. “Sure,” I said. “Allis and I are going away for a few days anyway for Thanksgiving—”

  I thought I heard him say “Oh!” with something lingering and painful in the sound.

  “—so you can have it all to yourself for a few days. Unless you want to come with us.”

  “Well … no. I mean, I wouldn’t go with you … Sure it’s no bother, me being there?”

  “You kidding? Of course not.”

  “Can I come over tomorrow night?”

  “Sure. Let’s have dinner then.”

  “You’re on. See you about seven.”

  “And so,” he said at dinner, stretching back in his chair and smiling that tough smile I remembered, “I’m at loose ends again.”

  “Oh?” I would play Mr. Bones to his Dr. Interlocutor. The other end man / person was not present.

  “I’ve had it. We’ve had it, Claire and I.”

  He seemed to be waiting for a response.

  “Oh,” I said again.

  “You don’t seem surprised.”

  “I don’t?”

  “You suspected.”

  “Me?”

  “Bastard.” He bent to his food.

 
He fades and withers in the evening.

  O teach us how to number our days,

  That we may attain a heart of wisdom.

  Allis moves very close to me. I feel the contours of her hip, its warmth, the very strength of its presence. I think of how often, how very often and how very long, I have stroked this hip and the other; how many countless times I have lain across them, moved between them, behind them. How much I admire the solid swelling, broadening of her hips, never mind her vanity, which recalls smaller, more svelte shapings. Feeling my pressure, perhaps more unseemly than the situation calls for, she looks at me and we exchange smiles beneath Paul’s father’s breaking voice. Death does have its dominion, perhaps in theory like the medieval flatness of the earth; but life has one, too.

  Mark the innocent, look upon the upright;

  For there is a future for the man of peace.

  The first time I closed with those hips, those swellings of her body, was when Allis and I left Bread Loaf two days after our meeting in the woods. We drove southward slowly, seeking a place off the main roads where we could stop for the night. We did not talk much about this stopping, the making love; some things do not have to be discussed to death. You just know when they should happen.

  I simply said, “Let’s find a place to eat and stop over.” (For, at that point, nothing had been said about it.)

  “Okay,” she said. “I keep hearing about this great New England fish chowder and delightful colonial bedrooms. Let’s find them.”

  We drove then, slowly, looking for a place.

  We found an inn wedged between a stream, grassland and mountains. It was small, friendly in soft afternoon sunlight. Nevertheless, we entered it with the natural apprehensions of the time, given who we were. There was, however, no crusty old Vermonter to be startled, no descendant of that clan who had closed doors in the faces of Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys on their way to Fort Ticonderoga. Instead, the inn was owned and managed by an ex-jazz musician whose single, immense claim to posterity was that Charlie Parker had let him sit in during a set in Framingham. Daniel, too, had played alto sax. It was hung above the bar where all this was discussed, the car still unloaded, for I had liked Bird, also. Daniel gave us the “suite,” which was a small room with a grand view and a working fireplace. We stayed two days and nights, and when we were leaving, Daniel invited us back to spend Thanksgiving. That was the beginning of the ritual and this, now, would be our second, and driving up we were aware of it. Where did we go from ritual? The question filled the car. At Daniel’s inn it bobbed up between us during our early morning walks in the snow; it haunted the comfortable spaces when we sat in the suite before the warming fireplace. The question begged the answer, for one does not do the same things repeatedly, even the maddest of us, without pausing at some deeply interior moment to wonder why. I liked being in that sturdy building, the wind at night fondling, rather than buffeting, it, while Daniel played Charlie Parker records. I liked being there with her.